


the river

by fnowae



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Character Death, Heavy Angst, M/M, Magic, Magical Realism, Premonitions, Sort Of, im opening this and typing whatever the fuck I want to see what comes out, ish?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 04:23:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15404892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fnowae/pseuds/fnowae
Summary: Do you know how much your choices matter?





	the river

**Author's Note:**

> I spitballed this with no planning. And that is how people die. 
> 
> I literally just opened a draft and wrote the first sentence and jumped off of it with no idea where I was going, and here we are. Holy hell.

“Do you know,” Patrick asks, hand tangled in another, eyes tracing the skyline as it disappears below him, “how much your choices matter?”

“Do you know,” Pete, owner of the other hand, echoes, in a tone that clearly means he doesn’t take Patrick’s question seriously, “how cryptic you sound sometimes?” 

Patrick hums. It’s a yes, but he doesn’t need to say it. They both know. Patrick drops his free hand under his seat, into undulating, icy waters that have never really been there at all. 

The river lives on the back of Patrick’s vision. It always has. It didn’t take him long to realize no one else sees it - so he stopped asking. He stopped wondering why he, of all people, sees it, too, and took to accepting it. It doesn’t mean much. Seeing and feeling the river means nothing because Patrick can’t change it. 

The river is the course of everything. Patrick figured that out pretty easily. It started large and straight when he was young and helpless and now it branches off every time he makes a choice, no matter how big or small. Patrick jumped onto a new branch when he ate cereal instead of a pancake for breakfast this morning. It doesn’t matter. The paths afterwards appeared nearly the same anyways. 

Patrick can see other people’s branches of the river, if he’s touching them and he tries hard enough. He checks Pete’s quite often under the guise of being affectionate. It tends to fit rather nicely over his own. Patrick considers this to be a good thing. Their choices are constantly intertwined, overlapping. Patrick suspects their rivers might not be able to handle separating entirely, ever. He treats this knowledge as some sort of unsettling insurance. 

“Patrick,” Pete says, nudging, pulling Patrick away from the feeling of reality running through his fingers, “what do you want to drink?”

“Oh.” Patrick notices the flight attendant waiting patiently in the aisle. How long have they been in the air? He hums softly again. He does this a lot. It makes the river ripple. He likes the look of it, and it’s the most change he can ever make. (His fingers seldom make a visual difference. It’s the feeling of it that he does that trick for.) 

As he always does before making a choice, any choice, no matter how small, Patrick checks the river. What he’s looking for is a path smaller then the rest, one rapid and dangerous, or one that simply ends. None of these are ever good things. Safety is thick, evenly flowing branches, the sign of a safe choice, of continuing to live on to make another. Usually, small choices don’t lead to danger, but after an order at a restaurant yielded the potential of an ending stream, Patrick is always far too careful.

Now, he floats, immobile, in front of ten branches. They all twist away and then turn back together barely a foot later. His choices will make no difference today. It’s a good sign. 

“Ginger ale, please.” Patrick drifts down a bubbling side-stream, then right back onto the main path. Nothing has changed, not really. 

“Alright.” The flight attendant smiles, ignorant to the way Patrick had handled his decision. His trips to sight the river don’t usually take away real time. He suspects time doesn’t exist there at all. (Checking other people’s paths, however, tends to lock in with the passage of the real world. Patrick can’t explain this any more than he can explain why the fabric of the universe is available to him and him alone.)

Patrick accepts his ginger ale with a politely returned smile. The river tells him it doesn’t matter whether he drinks it now or not. He takes a careful sip. 

“You want to watch a movie?” Pete offers, gesturing to the screen inset on the back of the seat in front of him. “We’ve got a decently long flight.”

Patrick hums, sits back, and scans the river. 

///

They watch _The Post_. It’s a good movie. One of the many branches had seemed to lead Patrick’s river off course, so he’d made a careful guess and hoped he didn’t end up choosing that one. He hadn’t. (Patrick usually can’t tell which stream correlates to which choice. Sometimes a certain branch gives off a strong scent, sound, or emotion, but that’s not common. It’s often a guessing game.)

Pete drives them home from the airport. Patrick lets himself separate their hands for a little. As far as Patrick’s visibility goes on the river, Pete’s had looked alright. There’s some kind of splitting choice approaching, but both streams it broke into looked perfectly fine. It will probably turn out to be something tiny with big but harmless implications. Maybe it’s another food choice. 

When they pull into their driveway and head inside to unpack, Patrick decides that’s exactly what it is. The first thing Pete does is open the fridge and groan. 

“What is it, hon?” Patrick calls from the living room, where he’s working at refolding a blanket their housesitter had misplaced. 

“Out of milk. I wanted late night cereal,” Pete complains. Patrick’s eyes drift to the clock. It’s nearly midnight. For Pete and cereal, this is early.

That’s the choice, he supposes. Pete is either going to go get more milk or get by without cereal ‘til the morning, when they’re supposed to have it in the first place. And neither choice will mean much, so Patrick supposes he doesn’t care which ends up becoming reality.

“You want to get some?” he offers. He thinks the river may ebb and flow just slightly differently than it usually does, but it’s probably his imagination. 

“Hell yeah,” Pete responds, shutting the fridge door and turning to Patrick, beaming, “midnight milk trip it is.”

They head right back out to the car without even unpacking, pulling out of the driveway and starting to close the ten minute distance to the nearest twenty-four hour store. Pete turns the radio way up and only laughs when Patrick complains that all the neighbors will hate them. 

“We don’t need boring people to like us, ‘Trick,” Pete tells him, yanking the car around a fast paced turn that would make Patrick’s heart stop in his chest if he didn’t know Pete’s river was going to continue on. 

Even though he knows, his hand instinctively finds Pete’s arm - a frightened gesture to Pete, something different entirely to Patrick. He dips into Pete’s river, reminding himself there’s no end in sight. 

He isn’t sure what to do when there is. 

Patrick’s heart leaps and twists and he’s worried he might be sick. He’s seen the ends of rivers before. He’s never been on one. This is wrong. He swears both choices were safe before, but of course he should have waited until he was closer, until his limited visibility revealed, further onwards, a break. Fuck. Pete is on his way to nothing at all. 

Patrick switches to his own river. His hand on Pete’s arm feels like it’s burning, but he doesn’t remove it. His own stream continues on as far as he can see. 

Pete is going to die. Patrick isn’t. 

Patrick jumps back to Pete’s stream, trying to hear, feel, taste some telltale sign in Pete’s river that tells him what’s going to happen. Maybe he can prevent it. But the stream is just a stream like all the others. The only difference is the end. 

“Babe, you alright?” 

Patrick’s head snaps up. He’s been staring wide eyed at the floor as he’s jumped between rivers. Time passes when he’s on someone else’s. And now they’re at the store. 

“Yeah,” Patrick lies. “I’m okay.” 

He isn’t. Neither is Pete. And Pete knows none of that. 

“Okay,” Pete says, unconvinced, but he doesn’t need to be. Patrick could care less right now. 

Patrick clings to Pete once they’re inside, studying his river over and over and over again as Pete grabs the milk and new cereal and “a couple other things, while we’re here, you know?” He pays attention to nothing but the way the streams and creeks and roaring floods weave in and out of each other, giving him every choice but the one he needs. 

The end is still a bit away. It continues to get closer, but there’s time. Patrick can work with that. 

Pete rests on the right side of the fork the cereal had created. The thick band that represents _stayed home, no milk_ is still parallel to him. There’s no end, there. So that’s the goal. Get back on the right path. Save Pete. 

Except, there’s no way to do that. Occasionally, Patrick has jumped paths, even saved a life doing it before, but he can’t just get out of one stream and into the other. They need to connect. And these two don’t. 

It’s hopeless. Pete is stuck on the way to his death. And there’s nothing Patrick can do about it. 

Except there is. 

Because when Patrick glances back to his own river, making sure again that he’s safe, at least - though now he thinks he might prefer it if they went together - he catches a split second of his river and Pete’s overlayed. And this changes everything. 

Because sometimes you don’t see the full story on one stream alone. Sometimes two rivers are inexplicably linked, and you can change one using the other. Patrick’s done it before. Hell, Patrick’s done it on Pete before. It would be easy to use his own path to change Pete’s. There would just need to be a way. 

And there is - when the rivers lay atop each other, a tiny stream in Patrick’s bridges the two thick streams in Pete’s. It’s a way out. 

( _It’s a way out that isn’t a good one because it gets Pete’s river back onto the extended stream but Patrick’s tiny section leaves that thick part and immediately ends and it’s not perfect and it’s a you or me situation and Patrick’s mind rushes through all of that at once and he hops the stream_.) 

Patrick can switch streams without knowing what choice makes the switch, and it’s helpful. Like right now, when he crosses his pitiful little creek and finds himself saying, without choosing to, except for the fact that he did, “Hey, I’m gonna go start the car and pull up to get you, that looks like a lot.” 

None of it even makes sense until Patrick realizes they’re already at the cashier and Pete’s arms are loaded with things they didn’t come for and suddenly there’s a very solid image in his mind of Pete going back for one of those dropped bags and kneeling down before _a pair of headlights_

“Thanks!” Pete says enthusiastically. He has no clue the love of his life has just sacrificed himself for him. How could he know? The rivers are only Patrick’s, and now they’ll be no one’s at all. 

Patrick allows himself to break, to pull Pete into a hug and whisper, “You know I love you, right?”

“Of course,” Pete says immediately, looking down at Patrick, “is everything okay?”

Patrick thinks he might explain. He thinks he might break down for real and explain the river and the path and how he’s about to die but it’s for the best, he promises, but he’s too afraid and there’s a tugging in his chest telling him this happens _now_ or it doesn’t happen at all. 

“Yes,” he lies. “I’ll go get the car.”

“Okay.” Pete smiles softly, presses a loving hand to the side of Patrick’s face, and Patrick savors the last touch he’ll ever feel. “I love you too.”

Patrick nods, more dutifully than anything, and turns to duck past the register and out the front doors. 

The cold air presses against Patrick’s skin. He watches his river speed dangerously towards the point of no return. He isn’t even intertwined with Pete anymore. _No turning back now_ is the only thing on his mind. 

Then it’s headlights and screeching tires and pain that’s meant for Pete, but Patrick’s never been one to let his soulmate get hurt, not if he can stop it. 

Patrick hums with the last wisp of breath that wasn’t knocked out of him. The surface of the river ripples, one last time. The last thing he feels is the gentle waves lapping over the back of his hand. 

And then he feels nothing at all.

**Author's Note:**

> uh, thanks for reading? I didn’t expect this any more than you did. so this is what my subconscious is like! fun!
> 
> as I always say, I love comments and kudos, so those are very much appreciated. I’m on tumblr under the same username as here if you want to talk anytime :D
> 
> Thanks!


End file.
